Book Description

Already in 1972, the National Museum of Modern Art had a major retrospective devoted to Man Ray. Like all exhibitions held in collaboration with the artist at that time, he extensively showed his creative activity and its fascinating diversity: paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures, assemblages, etc rayographs. In relation to the photographs, the other media were there in very small numbers. The current exhibition at the Centre Pompidou proposes therefore is the complementary part of the previous. The focus is on photography by bringing together hundreds of photographs, both masterpieces of unknown, or little known, aspects of his production: portraits of Dadaists and Surrealists friends, the celebrities of intellectual and artistic Paris, the Anglo-Saxon writers, creative photography Illustrative for surrealist magazines, nudes and rayographs but also views of Paris, the photo mode and commissioned portraits. Some of these blocks, unknown in original prints, have recently been drawn and will be shown for the first time. As for painting and objects, fifty highly selected pieces will give a renewed vision of success he has achieved in various moments of his life with fresh and inventive works.